Porsche Cup - Deja Vue - 16th Sept

[picnic]

Last night we had the odd flying car, which is almost certainly due to the fact I used a skin that others did not have. This car had the UKnnn style number on it. I'd like to repeat things as best as possible with a skin with standard numeric numbers. Thanks in advance for your help.

Date: Friday 16th September
Time: Practice at 8PM (Set to one hour), Qualify2 at 8:30-9PM (Depending on Numbers/Votes)
Cars Allowed: Any Porsche
Track: Brno
Session Length: 20mins Qualify, 20mins Race
Server: Picnic server will be used.
Weather: Dry

We will try and run 3 short races again with only the first one having qualifying in it and the other two races straight to race.

[greg130]

Yes it was very weird, never seen it before.
Your addon car showed up as a Lister for me, must have been a differnt addon car with the same number ?  In the past when I have raced on servers where I havnt had the addon car you normally see the pace car in its place.
The first race was fine for me last night.  On the second or third race, cant rember now, I went flying.  My car was stuck above the track spinning round and round, very odd.
Odd thing is on the replay it showed me stuck below the track with disjointed graphics.
I guess its down to the addon car.
Perhaps we should try two experiments, some with the addon, some without ?

[Simon Gymer]

we really need an official versioned UKGTR car pack to make this work more easily don't we?

[picnic]

We've run this track enough times without issue to lay blame at the skinned car, but I would like to know if the letters in the numbers cause more problems than simply numbers. Someone on RSC reckoned it did, but I have my doubts, hence the reason for a quick repeat.

[picnic]

we really need an official versioned UKGTR car pack to make this work more easily don't we?

At some stage we will, but I feel we need a better handle on what goes wrong. If not having a car, or the correct car, causes someone to lose a race it might be worth not bothering. Appling patches every week to race because of car changes will make it more of a chore that people won't have time to do. I see skins as a luxury which loses out the the prime aim of online racing.

Would be interesting if someone who took part in WOSEC would shed light on if they had any nasty issues attributed to running add-on skins.

[greg130]

Well I did a few races with WOSEC, these are my thoughts on it.
Individually painted cars are great but can cause problems.
If the car isnt painted correctly they can cause FPS drops, or certainly a reduction in FPS.
Having painted a few cars it is very time consuming, not something I would want to undertake again.
Normaly if a player does not have the addon car then the pace car takes its place, however as we found out last night this is not always the case and can lead to even more problems.
It would appear that it's very important not to have 2 cars sharing the same number.
As far as i'm aware the UK bit of the number would be cosmetic only.
There did seem to be a higher occurance of the 1fps bug initially on wosec, however I never suffered from it and instances seemed to occur less often after a while.
You will get a greater number of 'mismatch' occurances, especially if cars are changed or updated.
Also different cars may end up sharing the same pit spot unless the numbers are allocated correctly within the game.

For my money it's not really worth the effort and potential problems that it can cause, having said that wosec did run very smothly in the end.  The person on wosec who delt with the addons was RS.

[picnic]

Thanks Greg, when Pops and myself were playing around with this about a month ago we ended up running 2 cars with the same number without spotting any extra problems. The game is obviously happy with you doing this with the supplied vehicles. Perhaps it's a feature of how you make the skin whether is causes grief or not.

I tried some American V8 update thing somewhile ago and the cars kept being redrawn with thier original skins as some distance graphics had not been made correctly. Obviously painting skins is an art form, in more ways than 1

[silver53]

Hi all as you may know I came over to UKGTR as the other series I did lasted about 3.5 hrs and now they are playing with painted cars I have not the time for it . Hope this series is not going same way . That sort of thing may be ok if you have lots of time on your hands but is no good to those of us doing it to relax after a hard days work . Those are my thoughts regards gerald

[greg130]

I tried some American V8 update thing somewhile ago and the cars kept being redrawn with thier original skins as some distance graphics had not been made correctly. Obviously painting skins is an art form, in more ways than 1

Well there are a total of 3 files/skins you have to paint for each car, close, middle and far distance.  Actually you only have to paint 1 really, the close up, then you resize it for the middle distance file.  The far distance skin dosn't have to be that acuarate, just the main colours etc.
However the tricky part is making sure they are all saved to the right size, transparity effect, etc,etc, obviously you then need to convert and import.  Then if you want to be flash you can mess about with the cockpit graphics, wheels, driver, helmet.
I found it a long old job with lots of messing about to get it just right, something I really couldnt be botherd with again.

[fozzmeister]

I think there are those of us that want short races, and those that want much longer races, personally I want to race something like 2-3 hour races sometimes (although obviously not every week). I'm absolutely sure there is always going to be more than sufficient interest in the shorter races going.

[greg130]

Will try to make it tonight but it might be a bit early for me.

[picnic]

Small turn out and again we experienced issues, no flying cars this time but then with 4 and 3 drivers per race there was not much chance of that.

I'd like to thank those that tried, at least 2 didn't race due to not being able to hear their own cars.

My personal opinion is that skinning is not a viable way forward, you can make it work be ensuring all clients and the server have the same car set but this involves a fair amount of messing around, especially if people are forever tweaking their creations. I am here for the racing, I enjoy driving around in the skinned cars but I wouldn't want to dictate to 150+ members they must have this and that installed to race. (This is my persoanl view)

[greg130]

Sorry I missed last night, ended up being fairly busy with home life.
For what its worth I agree with Picnic on this.  One thing is for sure, unless everybody installs the addon cars then you will get problems.

[fozzmeister]

Agreed Picnic, I'm not interested at all in skins for GTR, but if it were to be done, I think we'd need one giant Zip (Not RAR ), that is fixed for the entire season, and will not be changed once, if your unhappy with the design in that, tough.

[[ZiP]Tyf]

Have had lots of problems with this as well with public servers. Sometimes cars show up as the safety car, but mostly you have no sound and it's impossible to drive. 1 Big file would be a good idea for the whole season though, since most of us have bb connections and some of us can host the file as well

T